As a single parent, I know that raising a child can be stressful, which sometimes leads parents to indulge themselves with booze when they are “off duty.”  However, waking up with a nasty hangover the next morning really sucks. But hangovers can be cured. Believe me— I’ve had plenty of practice. Here is my “hangover cure” recipe. I like this recipe because I can whip it up sometimes in under 30 minutes, which helps to not let the hangover “settle in.” I also like this recipe because I find that I always have extra biscuits left over, which my four-year-old daughter, who is very picky with food, loves.

Biscuit ingredients:

-2 cups all purpose flour

-1 teaspoon baking powder (leveled)

-1/4 teaspoon baking soda

-1 teaspoon sea salt (leveled)

-1/4 stick of cold butter, maybe a little more

-1 ½ cup of buttermilk

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Then, combine your dry ingredients in a big bowl. Don’t go overboard with the baking powder and baking soda, keep these ingredients fairly exact, or your biscuits might end up tasting terrible. Mix the dry ingredients. Chop up the butter into thin strips, or chunks, with a knife, and mix it in with everything else. Add buttermilk until the dough is not powdery anymore, about a cup and a half should do it, then mix, but don’t over-mix. Take a spoon, and spoon out the dough evenly in little mounds on an ungreased cooking sheet. Cook until you see edges of the biscuits begin to turn golden brown (dough should not be pasty, but fluffy, on the inside), about 15 minutes or so. Start your gravy after the biscuits have been cooking for five minutes if you want your biscuits and gravy to be ready around the same time.

Gravy Ingredients:

-3/4 single serving bottle of whole milk, or about 2 ½  cups.

-quarter, to one-half of a pound, of hot Italian pork sausage.

-wild mushrooms, i.e. Morel, Hen of the Woods, Oyster, etc…(optional)

-1 tablespoon of all-purpose flour

-sea salt

-black pepper

Get the pan hot, and cook your sausage down a little bit, and break it up into little chunks. If using mushrooms, add your mushrooms after about five minutes. Add the milk once the sausage has more or less had a chance to cook, it’s best to use milk that’s not cold. Stir, and let the milk heat up to a rolling simmer. Then, begin adding your tablespoon, or so, of flour (how much flour to add is kind of an art, but with some practice you will get better.) Whisk the flour into the milk immediately (use a fork if you don’t have a whisk, but a whisk is better). Add lots of black pepper, go crazy with it. Then add a bit of sea salt as well. Keep stirring all the while until it gets thick, you may have to add more milk, or flour, to get the consistency how you want it. Reduce heat. Cut some biscuits in half and pour it over the top of the biscuits. Serve with ice cold kombucha tea to further attack your hangover. And there you go— breakfast made, hangover gone, everyone is happy!

Bart Dziegiewski